Epitomes of three sciences

This little book, Epitomes of Three Sciences gives an account of the recent work done in three different fields of modern knowledge; viz., Comparative Philology, Experimental Psychology, and Old Testament History. These three sciences have an almost direct bearing upon the religious views of our time, in spite of their difference of subject and the divergence of their authors' standpoints. This preface is intended to explain in a few words the relation in which Comparative Philology, Experimental Psychology, and Biblical History stand to one another. Philology treats of language; and it is language that has created man and human society. It is speech that distinguishes the soul of man from the souls of rute creation. We shall never understand the mystery of man's dignity, his superiority and dominion over the rest of the animal world upon earth, until we have acquired an insight into the growth of the human soul as mirrored in the evolution of human speech. Language is not, as has been supposed in former times, a supernatural phenomenon; it is of natural growth; and nothing elucidates this truth more than Comparative Philology, which demonstrates that where at first sight the whims of fanciful invention or wilful caprice seemed to reign, in reality definite laws obtain, shaping the development of our speech in all its innumerable phases and changes. The same holds good of Psychology. The human mind is of natural growth, and the various caprices of the soul that at first. "'It need scarcely be added that every one of the three authors is an authority in his specialty, and that none of these essays was written with any other purpose in view than that of summing up the present state of things in their three several departments.

Epitomes of three sciences by H. Oldenberg, J.Jastrow and C.H. Cornhill